ASCII by Jason Scott

Boy, you can’t get drier than that for a title, but I thought I’d mention all this anyway.

While working on some of my editing, I discovered a small (about 20) set of clips from my collection are in fact dead. Black screen, empty soundtrack. Still the size they would be if they had data, but they don’t.

See the little black square in the upper left? That’s bad.

Well, nobody likes stumbling on that. Luckily, my paranoid approach to all this works out: the description of what’s in the clip is there, and I have the date, and I have the raw footage at hand, so I can re-extract these needed clips with little issue. Bear in mind I’m well over 1,000 clips so the percentage affected by this is small.

The issue is that I used USB drives. But actually, not that I used USB drives, but I used a specific type of USB drive.

I get kidded for the use of USB, but it works out for me and it’s cheaper than a lot of alternate approaches, and I offload a lot of quantifying and recordkeeping from them so they’re simply and truly storage. I have copies of all data across them, and I utilize local internal drives. At least, I do more than I used to.

When I would render from Vegas, my editing program, it would render out to a holding bin on a USB drive. Specifically, a Seagate 750gb External Drive. These are enjoyable little suckers, with a nice tough case and real heft, and it helps when you have a massive stack of these things like I do.

Well, among the “features” on these drives is “spin-down”. In “spin-down”, the drive notices nobody has been talking to it for a while. So it goes emo and shuts down. When it’s requested by the parent OS going “you better get out there and mow the lawn”, there’s this delay while the emo drive gathers up its stuff and its iPod and goes out. This pause makes my entire OS pause. Ain’t pretty.

Anyway, Vegas was apparently doing this clever thing where it’d make a request, not get a timely response, then get one later, then render out as if there were no issues. Result: black video, silent soundtrack.

Some time ago, I switched to rendering to a proper SATA internal drive, then pushing out to a few externals every day or so. This obviated the problem. But going through editing, I found these little reminders that nothing’s too easy, nothing can be looked away from and just assumed to be perfect when you need it.

Lots of little lessons come up like this. I just thought this one would be interesting to mention.

This is very nice footage. Even if occasionally very emo.

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Whoever gets annoyed by that title, just calm the hell down. I was doing a cute reference to this movie title, which you have to admit is pretty memorable.

Well, OK, I want people to calm down but in fact this entire weblog entry is about flipping out, so feel free to get all wound up again. Actually, do whatever you feel necessary; in today’s wonderful world of online discourse, we’ll get to do anything we want to so that trend might as well continue on here.

I promised I was done writing about that movie and I am, I totally am. Instead, I’m going to write about some back and forth related to it that you might not have been aware of, and what that means in the greater totality of stuff.

After I started getting dozens and dozens of links back to my weblog entry, I knew it was just a matter of time before people related to the production would find it. It’s not that hard to find me and I’m not being Mr. Ego when I say that stuff I write about tends to get the attention of the people being talked about, if I talk about them. Witness that whole thing about the Electric Slide, where I got the Electric Slide creator, the plantiff and defendant in the only dance copyright case, the EFF lawyer, and a bucket of Greek Chorus. I’m not saying what I did necessarily deserved their attention, but for the current golden age of weblogging, my doing so held enough prominence, arbitrarily, to get the focus of all those related people for some short time. It’s nice. It will eventually go away.

When people write to you with opinions that you have written about, you don’t always get positive responses, especially if you compare their creative output with sodomy. Hence, they tend to write rather energetically in a direction non-parallel to your own. I like getting those perspectives. None were forthcoming from the producers of The Movie. OK, fine. I have a lot of pillows and they absorb a lot of tears. But I couldn’t imagine they didn’t, you know, stumble upon what I wrote.

This lack of imagination on my part was validated when I found out they had read about it and were writing about it. Not to me, mind you; that would be too easy. No, they were writing to people linking to my writing to “set the record straight” or at least try to dissuade them from talking about it too much longer. Major mistakes were made in this process.

The writer, Ed Cunningham, who was producer of this film, insisted the writing be confidential. Well, dude, someone has totally misjudged what the concept of confidentiality is. You implement confidentiality in two fashions. You demand confidentiality because someone is under your chain of command. You insist it be kept confidential that your company made X dollars selling things one way and Y dollars selling another. Trade secrets. You demand this of your underlings or contemporaries or you add the “confidential” marking on the communications you do so that it is clear to people within the chain of command above or below you this is sensitive. There’s a whole science to it. You’re doing it wrong.

The other way you demand confidentiality is this. You write to someone. “I’d like to speak to you, but it has to be confidential.” The person you are speaking to either tells you they’re totally down with this or you should go fuck a couch. If they say they’re down with it, then you speak to them confidentially. I’ve done this myself, both as the receiving and providing parties of the confidentiality. Upon acknowledgment, the receiving party gets your confidential missive and you are communicating. Pre-emptively declaring confidentiality is poor form.

Oh, there’s a sort of third way, but it has less and less meaning these days. The third way is that if you demand confidentiality upon the writing of your communication and the person “breaks” this confidentiality, they are revealed as a harlot and can never work in this town again. This third way depends on three premises that are not very valid: that anyone gives a toss if you’re a harlot, whether there’s a “town” to no longer work in again, and whether you have any sway whatsoever to get someone declared a harlot in this town. This is, as I said, a nearly impossible conflagration in the modern era. Go fuck a couch.

Anyway, so the confidential but not really confidential message got forwarded to me, and the positions were, roughly:

• We have chosen not to engage Jason publicly.
• This letter is confidential and we’re sending it to you.
• Jason is wrong.
• Jason uses information from people at Twin Galaxies, who don’t like the film.
• Jason is a biased filmmaker who hopes to one day make a documentary about arcades and so he’s bitter.

I disclaim that these are my summarizations and feel free to post the real letter somewhere and then call me wrong.

Anyway, I can’t speak to the fact that I have had to rely on Twin Galaxies and related folks as one of the sources of my complaints, beyond the fact that I definitely did. Yes, I used other parties to discuss this film, parties that felt wronged by the film. Yes, yes, I did.

As for any amount of “oh no, Arcade is ruined” thing, I can completely assure you that Arcade is not ruined. I have 20 hours shot already, and I expect by the time I’m done I’ll be at the 200 interview mark and it will be longer than the BBS Documentary was. When you live your sad little existence thinking of everything and everyone as “fuckoverable”, “fuckupable”, and “other”, then I could see where you think I’m non-positive because my movie’s been “killed” or some sort of zero-sum game bullshit. But let me assure all parties: Not the Case.

It is remarkably cheeseball to go about this by sending back-routed letters about this whole thing to people linking to me. It is definitely less cheesy than having strawmen make fake accounts and implying something untoward about me and my motivations and the rest. But make no mistake, OK? It is cheesy. I realize that the window for your little flick’s sales is about six weeks from time of release, which was four weeks ago, so you’re just gritting your fucking teeth hoping my untoward statements will just stay out of your goddamn way until the release window is over and you can relax. I know how it works. I don’t like it but I know how it works.

But let’s get beyond all this and even the sleazy tactics of Ed Cunningham, who appears to have an excellent future in the world of filmmaking, and whose name I expect to show up mysteriously and spontaneously in the future releases and discussions of my future films. Right now he is working hard to make a highly fictionalized movie based on a shortcut-filled documentary. His comfort level with this sort of activity is why you will never see me doing the “Hollywood” thing. OK? OK.

Now, to get to what I am primarily trying to say.

Realize that online discussion is very useful in some ways and very problematic in others.

On the plus side you get immediacy, truly global access, and (more than a pool hall debate anyway) permanence. You can cross-reference, you can engage immediately, you can argue like hell while home, then go to work and keep arguing, then get out your phone while out at a restaurant and argue even more. You can, in other words, never stop arguing. With BBSes, you had the problem of one caller at a time, so you only had a short time to make your stuff count. You might back off, then. With in-person debates, you are less likely to use language like cretinous fucktard in the course of describing your collaborators. When you engage online, you totally lose all those self-limiting conveyances and can get right to pure, uncut argument.

Unfortunately, this position of mine is, even though it’s laced with profanity and apparent cynicism, idealistic. The question of a debate is, how much is too much?

We’ve all seen this. A guy says something. Someone responds negatively, in a paragraph or two, or maybe even more. The original guy responds even more to that person. To some people, the debate is now over. This appears to be magazine limit, the rate at which most magazine debates end; article, letter to editor, response from writer. You cross some threshold then. I am going to coin it. I am going to call it the zota threshold.

Here’s zota’s weblog. zota’s name is Jason. He’s an engaged guy. He’s smart. He’s definitely not a slouch. And, if you spend the time going over all my stuff, it is zota who has pushed things to the level they are now. I can’t imagine I would have written an eight thousand word weblog entry about a subject if I hadn’t gotten such a tough customer in zota.

Watch him in action over here at Will’s weblog. This is not run of the mill discussion. Seven go-arounds occur, each one is progressively hostile on both sides, each one draws in more facts and suppositions, and I think each of us has a point when we go “Oh, come ON”. Not, and this is important, not because there’s nothing left to say and not because all the points brought up have been addressed, but because this medium, this immediate, global, permanent medium is being stretched in very odd places and the format of weblog entry and comments is obviously not the best container for the ocean of discussion being brought up.

In fact, and since zota has more than once come up with theories as to how I do things, my own impression is that only if we were to assemble in a room myself, Ed Cunningham, Seth Gordon, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Steve Wiebe, Michael Moore, Robert Shaye, Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, strap us to chairs, videotape the whole thing and then ask an unbelievable amount of questions under oath would he be satisfied. This is, utterly, his right, but there is a point when the diminishing returns of such an approach outweigh the aspects of truth being plumbed.

For my own bit, I try not to get hung up on the specific debate but what the greater meaning or context is. Teach a man to punch someone in the face and you get a boxer, but teach a man to punch anyone in the face and you get a weblogger.

The reason half of the mongo entry was about BBS Documentary was because I wanted to draw parallels to how these sorts of films are made and what they mean, or else I would feel I was truly wasting my time. The number of people who were so explicitly unhappy with my verbiage up to that point that they enunciated it to me was one: zota. So instead of being stuck in a zota-loop, I made the context greater. I think the essay has more meaning. Some, however, don’t get it.

Some, also, don’t want it! For many people, the zota threshold is not three go betweens. It’s one! They don’t want this stuff gone into beyond what’s there. They might make commentary on it, but not in the way one comments on a work to bring greater meaning; they just want to squirt a little whipped cream of themselves on someone else’s work. Comment pages encourage this, and I’ve begun to see a trend where sites are starting to put the commentary elsewhere, on a separate section, linking back to the work. I can see why they would do that. I could see that very much indeed.

These extremes of the spectrum (I don’t want to talk about it, I wish to talk about it until all relevant parties die of old age) belie the number of people in the middle. The whole reason I got any attention at all was that a lot of people would see The Work, then go online and see Commentary on The Work. They wanted to know more. They didn’t need to read a book and half on it, but a nice set of paragraphs with greater context was just what they were looking for. Being sucked into a debate regarding truth and editing was perhaps an unexpected dessert, but OK, they’ll browse a little of that crap before they get bored and see what else is up. It’s not their job to know every single last debate and detail, especially when it appears some aspects are subjective. At that point, a 14-round comment go-between of two people pushes from an interesting discussion to a rapidly fading noise down the hall that you’re walking away from very briskly.

This problem of the zota threshold is not going away. I’d like to consider more of it.

But not for that long.

18 Comments

You might be surprised that I feel bad for the creators of the Wikipedia Documentary Truth in Numbers.

People who knew me as the writer of the most definitive critique of Wikipedia have occasionally asked me why I wouldn’t turn my documentary-making skills to doing a documentary about Wikipedia. Simply enough: any such film I made would be a polemic, a op-ed piece shot on video. It would be expensive for me to do properly. And every single interview with be charged with unpleasant energy. The resultant work, even if I did my best to be accurate, would be considered a biased slam-piece, made by someone who didn’t get it. It would be an awful lot of work for an unpleasant result, unwanted, uninteresting. So no.

But one needs to be made, and the guys who assembled to do it for Truth In Numbers have been hard at work doing it for the last couple of years (with the last year or so being full filming). They’ve been editing it, and I had expected them to be at South By Southwest, but apparently they just barely missed that boat.

In keeping with the “spirit” of Wikipedia, there’s a Wiki of sorts about the movie (warning, it IMMEDIATELY plays music and video when you go to it). There’s a non-wiki version of the movie’s website as well (unfortunately, it ALSO IMMEDIATELY plays music and video when you go to it.

I watched the production from afar, and assumed, quite rightly so, that it was going to be one big love letter to Wikipedia, one huge goddamned hug about how incredible Jimbo Wales is and what a messianic figure he is and what an awesome thing this whole Wikipedia is and how anyone who doesn’t absolutely love the fucking thing is going to end up as peat moss in the garden of the Web.

That said, these are not slouches: these filmmakers obviously work at their craft, and have been filming this movie for two years. That’s not an in-and-out cookie-cutter schedule. They’re taking it seriously.

Was I cranked I’ve never been contacted for an interview, even though they’ve passed through my geographic location a couple times? Well, sure. But not in that “I’ve been wronged” sense of being passed over; I’d rather be known for something other than being a Wikipedia Critic, thanks. It was more of a case of seeing them travel worldwide, talk to all these people, and I’d wasted time some years back coming up with what I think are cohesive arguments as to why the project has issues, arguments that in many cases have held up, and then they’re just going to keep interviewing starry-eyed Wikipedians about how great it is to stick it to the reference establishment.

But no, it turns out they’ve gotten some pretty good names up. Of course, like most chaotic film projects you have to go to a relatively obscure location to get the real list, and I guarantee someone might eventually try to delete this as being not part of the “make an encyclopedia” goal, but for the moment, there it is, a pretty nice sample set. I see a number of folks who aren’t 100% lovers of Wikipedia, who have some perspective, and so on. It appears one of them is Andrew Keen, who is held up as this big critic but who I consider the ultimate strawman, since so much of his arguments can be pierced by schoolchildren. But either way, you can see the work being done here.

So it’s with great sadness for these guys that I see the burst of news going on now. Jimbo Wales leaving his wife, Christine, and her filing for divorce. Jimbo being matched up with a new girlfriend and there being questions of his propriety with regards to her wikipedia entry. Jimbo making self-serving statements to this regard. And then, out of nowhere, a once-trusted aide to Wikimedia and Jimbo comes out with an amazing litany of accusations, from continuous mistresses to borderline embezzlement to questionable use of wikimedia funds, and always those bits of evidence of the high rock-star regard Wales has for himself, everywhere.

How could this reconcile with the documentary? What about the shots of him and his wife and her opinion of the project? How about his portrayal as the guy behind this? Will you include everything that just happened, or will you just cut it out, leading to endless squirming moments when this is shown at Wikipedia festivals and gatherings?

I don’t envy their job. Not at all.

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Today I woke up to cinematic snow.

Regular snow falls down in little flakes and eventually makes piles of snow. Cinematic snow is image-ready incredible prop snow where every flake is the size of a quarter and you can look out and even snowflakes hundreds of feet away are pretty visible. Because they’re huge, they fall slower, making life even easier. I knew I had to shoot this cinematic snow.

As part of GET LAMP, I’ve been shooting shots of a lamp in various beautiful locations. Some time ago it snowed so I took some shots of the lamp in snow. They were OK. But this was an opportunity too good to pass up; as I mentioned some entries ago, referencing the DV Rebel’s Guide, a low-budget film guy has the advantage of time, so if something comes up, he merely has to hop to it and take advantage of it.

Some people might go “ah, but I don’t want to GET UP and go OUTSIDE and go DO THIS”, and, well, sorry, you’re a slacker and your movie idea doesn’t deserve you. Make a minimal goddamn effort, Captain Couchrider. Get in the damn car.

West of my home is the beautiful town of, wait for it, Weston. This is a less-developed bedroom community which still has a nice amount of fields and open spaces. I figured I’d find one soon enough. And I did; just two miles away, I might as well have been in the mountains. So here’s some shots I got that way:

What I did was go up a somewhat unpleasantly slippery side road, past lots of estates, until the road was wide enough that the snowplows wouldn’t bother me and my car. I then took out the lamp, put it on a convenient pole, then took the camera and tripod out under my coat (it was snowing, after all), and plunked it into a small bank. This is what that looked like:

From another angle, it also looks rather desolate, although I assure you I am located right next to a road:

Unfortunately, the screen shots don’t really give you a full impression of the beautiful snow, so I’m going to give you a clip of motion from my shoot. I added some random Christmas music (because I think I’m funny) along with a random Nick Montfort quote (because I like Nick Montfort). I am putting it forward in WMV format, which I will continue to use in the future for these sketch-like clip examples, because it renders fast and is pretty nice-looking for its size. The wonderful Videolan VLC Player, which is free, will play these on Windows, OSX and Linux, so there you go, cranky platform pushers.

Enjoy the Cinematic Snow.

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You are either a fan of my presentations I’ve given over the years or you are not. I am not here to dissuade you in either direction. But I figured that since a lot of people think presentations are “magic” or otherwise a talent they are utterly incapable of, and because I happen to have a nice artifact lying around, I’d talk a little about my process.

I gave a talk last August at DEFCON, called “The Edge of Forever: Saving Computer History”. The entire presentation is located on Google Video, and is about an hour and a half. Here it is in a window:

If you were to have attended DEFCON last year and looked at the program, you would have found this description of the talk, written by me:

THE EDGE OF FOREVER – MAKING COMPUTER HISTORY, by Jason Scott, TEXTFILES.COM
Too often, “Computer History” gets shoved into a forgotten bin of irrelevancy, devoid of use for lessons and understanding. Even more often, people often fail to realize they’re making history themselves. Jason Scott will walk though the basics of computer history, what to save, how to ensure things last for future generations, or perhaps how to ensure it’s never found again.

Very general, and it was intentionally so, because I was leaving it open until the last possible moments to nail down specific details about the talk. I know computer history and I know about archiving (although my cousin would be quick to point out that I am not familiar with all the library science and archiving terms for doing so). The DEFCON call for papers happens a few months in advance (the starting date for submitting talks this year is March 1st, for example, with it closing on May 15th, for an August conference) so I knew things might shift between close and the conference.

In a case like this, I am relying rather strongly on two aspects to get my talk/presentation accepted. One is my reputation, that is, I actually show up and give the talk and it’s actually a talk, and the second is the relative obscurity/uniqueness of my topics. If you look at the list of speakers for DEFCON 15, there’s only a few in the same space: the UFO talk by Richard Thieme (which was an absolutely lovely historical talk and editorial perspective, and is available here), and Self-Publishing and the Computer Underground, which had several historical and historical-minded figures on the panel (and who I count as friends). That second talk is here.

As a result, my sort of talk is somewhat of use to a situation like DEFCON, where the talks are rather heavy with discussions of exploits, malware, and security. Security, in fact, dominates DEFCON as it does in a lot of other conferences, ostensibly because it packs them in. I don’t actually attend security talks all that often, because there’s nothing in them for me. I’m sure for people choosing talks, they look around for a little spice, and they know I will at least show up and give a cohesive work, so I get chosen.

There are two talk types I give, which I organize internally: narrative, and fact-filled. Narratives are talks where I have a story arc and move through the arc through the given time. The majority of my talks work this way. The others are fact recitations, which I enjoy less but which have more hard information for the benefit of the audience that wants this. I’ve probably given less than a half-dozen of these, whereas I’ve given probably two dozen talks of the narrative stripe over the years.

When I work on a talk, I try to understand what audience I’m working with. It helps if I’ve been to the conference before, because then I can recall the sort of folks and the sort of venue I was dealing with. If I haven’t, I try and listen to any talks or presentations given before and gauge the audience reaction, looking for what was liked the most. I am a very huge fan of racking back as far as possible and trying to understand the greater context of the talk I’m going to give and where I’m giving it. It is one thing to give a presentation before a slightly buzzed or loose audience and another to give one to an audience who feels they owe their employers maximum attendance and are therefore going to every talk they can fit in and I happened to fit in. The emotions are different, the reactions are different.

For my fact-filled talks, I will have a whole sheet of researched stuff. If I need to know the exact date of something, the populations of organizations, the exact names of people, then I have all this planning to do and research to do. I don’t enjoy these because they’re essentially book reports, but the alternative is making up facts and I won’t do that either. Ultimately, though, the fact-filled talks simply have more rigorous pre-planned flow notes, done weeks or months before my presentation. This is OK because I choose subjects not beholden to dynamic forces that will have an effect over that time.

The day or sometimes within the hour of my talk, I will assemble a flowchart for myself to keep myself in check, and to make sure that in the heat of talking I don’t skip an important point. What prompted this weblog entry was that we happen to have at ready hand both my video performance (available above) and the actual notes I wrote for myself two hours before my presentation. Here they are:

(Sorry for the photos instead of flat images; my scanner’s on a spiritual journey at the moment.)

Watching the talk and then browsing along with the notes I have in front of me will likely pull some of the magician’s trickery out from your eyes. What might look like I’m musing about where to go next is in fact me glancing over the page and deciding if I need to go further down the current line or jump over to the next big idea. Some of my notes are utterly incomprehensible, little codes I say to myself to provide touchstones. AUDIENCE SCAN is my note to do what I often do now, ask people where they heard of me or any projects I’m up to. The LOD in a little circle means “start that story of hackers and history, which includes the Legion of Doom as mentioned in Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling”. Not intuitively obvious, I guess.

I found out just before this talk that there was nobody scheduled after me. I then decided that it would be cool to have optional longer stories and shove them in the middle of the talk. This is how I bloated a 50 minute talk to an hour and a half. There’s three stories in there (Amish, ARC-ZIP, Aleshe) that are utterly optional. This is why they’re all grouped together in the notes. “Should you decide to, here are more quills in your quiver. Otherwise, skip.”

Some stuff, I hear at the same time as the audience. The story of the Saved By The Bell collection is, for example, composed on the spot (the story is true but it’s not mentioned on my notes). My reaction of “It’s a constant maintenance nightmare!” is improv. A lot is improv. The key is to move on, listen to how the audience breathes, see how they are, and realize you have to keep moving if you’re not grabbing them.

Some people might find it terrifying that three and a half hotel-notepad-sized sheets of paper are all that stand between me and an hour and a half of speaking. I don’t find it terrifying at all, but maybe it’s because I really know that given the need, I can jump off into any old subject and hold forth. The narrative structure might suffer, but at least I can pull something out that would be amusing.

Anyway, here’s hoping something in here gives you insight to my approach.

3 Comments

I saw the movie Jumper last weekend with a few family members. I enjoyed the movie immensely, but for entirely wrong reasons. I am not recommending it for you unless these reasons have meaning to you as well.

Jumper‘s plot is simplistic by even high-concept standards, so I will provide it for you in a few simple sentences: An abused boy whose mother left him at 4 discovers in high school he can teleport short and long distances. He leaves his town and runs roughshod on the world for seven years, until he finds out there are people who can stop him from doing so and possibly kill him. He goes home and picks up an old girlfriend, gets into a fight with another jumper, and ultimately finds out his mom works for the people who are trying to kill him, which is why she left. He is victorious until the sequel.

Most of the movie is, therefore, exotic shots of locales he teleports to, fights he engages with another jumper or the people trying to kill him, and short conversations he has with people before doing one of the other two activities. It is truly and utterly soulless.

It is entertaining, though, in that way that watching a basic acrobatic act is entertaining; people come out, they do the trick, they move on. Eventually, someone changes up a trick so you go “woo” and then you’re back on the track for the next trick. But sometimes you get surprised and you’re basically more entertained than if you stared at a brick wall for an hour.

This review probably sounds cynical. I don’t entirely mean it to be. But why do I enjoy this film?

Simply put, it is just the kind of film I designed in my head when I was a teenager.

You have a lot of spare time as a teenager, or, more accurately, you are often put in a position of powerlessness as a teenager meaning you have to wait around a lot or you’re unable to make the most of your time. People tell you where to go or not go and what you’re allowed to think about and while it’s not entirely successful, it can be rather oppressive sometimes.

I loved movies so I would often make movies in my head. However, they were not very good movies. I’d have some basic ideas or a neat little trick, and then I’d construct this film in my head (which I thought was fantastic) and when I walked around the various towns I lived in, I could imagine them as locations or what I’d want to capture in the film and so on. It’s one of those time-passing things you do.

Looking back, of course, these movies are often quite shallow. A kid who is suspiciously like me gets some crazy power and he shows everybody up. Over and over. Until the movie ends. This is basically the plot of Jumper. Even the name, Jumper. You might as well call it Teenage Power Trip Movie with Samuel Jackson. Did I mention Samuel Jackson is in it? He is. He has white hair and he’s the “bad guy”, sort of, although you have to admit, watching it, his character kind of has a point.

Actually, looking at the movie from almost any angle but the central character’s self-centered point of view is a somewhat unhappy exercise, because then you realize nearly every other character is betrayed, mistreated or punished, often for no good reason. Alcoholic dad has his son run away one day, is really sad about this, cleans himself up a bit, thinks he hears his son nearby seven years later, comes in and finds he isn’t there, then is killed. Pretty sad, really. Dad was a bit messed up and he then gets killed. He doesn’t even find out why his wife left him, which was basically to avoid killing her own son.

But I am overthinking that aspect of things. Thinking of how Jumper came about, it’s as if I was given a nice office on the movie lot, and asked to make a film, and then some nice people worked out the logistics, and I was so happy someone was finally paying attention to me, that I let them make a few changes to make it easier to film. I wonder if, somewhere down the line in the production, there really was a twelve year old calling the shots. I know it’s based on a book, so I guess I’ll pick that up and see how it reads.

Either way, it was kind of fun to see this movie from this perspective. I can’t imagine it being a lot of fun from others, though.

I can’t wait for the sequel, in which people teleport a lot and fight.

4 Comments

Hi, filmmaker. I hope you found this weblog entry in the dark depths of your film production, when you’re desperately begging someone for the rights to some music, or when you’re stressing over whether to include that sequence with that really funny girl, even though you think it runs long. My advice: cut it and make it bonus footage. You can thank me later and your audience will thank me a thousand times over. Anyway, filmmaker, let’s chat.

Because search engines are weird, you maybe found this weblog entry because you searched for How to Subtitle Your Movie, Subtitle Software for DVD, Oh My God This Rave Is Amazing, or Sure-fire Techniques for Selling Your Film to Festivals. These last two don’t apply to what I’m going to talk about in this weblog entry, but you’re here now and you better goddamn sit down anyway. You sat through who knows how many paragraphs of how-to sites and speeches while making your movie, so what’s one more.

Filmmaker, I know the difficulties you’ve encountered, believe me. I remember when I made one of my student films and I slept overnight on the floor of one of the sets, using a bookbag as a pillow and the fetid air as my only blanket. I am not even lying to you, filmmaker, this happened. I also worked on a production where we made the two nice actors who were supposed to play brother and sister suddenly play lovers and we made those nice actors get it on in a couch in a registrar’s office at a college that looked sort of like a dining room. So I know uncomfortable and the itchiness of lying to actors and standing around while sin happens. I am your friend, filmmaker.

So filmmaker, take my hard-won advice and subtitle your fucking movie.

I have popped in so many DVDs over the last few years, filmmaker… so very many. I have watched films on skateboarding, on making zines, on live action role playing, on videogames and board games and word games and something called the Lesbian Film Festival because the chicks looked hot. I have sat through films on fonts, on throat singing, even on people who love watching movies. Think about that, filmmaker… I have watched a movie about people who watch movies. That’s how many movies I’ve watched; I’ve come out the other side and am now part of the movies being watched. That’s meta-, filmmaker. You know what meta is.

And through these films, I tolerate a lot of bullshit. Maybe you got a shot that’s really pretty but anyone with a brain cell would wonder what it’s doing in here. I’ve seen shots where it looks like the camera was strapped to the back of a great dane high on ketamine. I watched a documentary where the subjects had to hold their own shitty mikes, filmmaker, making the whole thing look like some hellish version of Bowling for Dollars. But I tolerated them, just like people will tolerate your little movie and all the mistakes you made.

But please, filmmaker, subtitle your fucking movie.

I know you hate the deaf. A lot of people can’t tolerate the deaf; they can’t hear you, after all, and you love the sound of your own voice. Someone who can’t hear this magnificent instrument is fucked up, filmmaker, and they will never know the true joy of you. But subtitles are the next best thing; not every shot is so obvious with the sound turned off that you can know what’s going on. People sometimes speak off-camera. And get this, filmmaker… some people just don’t talk all that good. Even more importantly, deaf-hating filmmaker, there are even better reasons to subtitle your movie:

• Some people answer the phone while your film is playing and that makes it easier for them to keep track of what’s going on. Yes, it’s a blasphemy that someone is going to do this during your magnificent film, but that’s what’s going to happen, and you might as well come to terms with it.
• Some people have kids and so they leave the thing muted so the kids don’t hear the bad words. You know what kids are, filmmaker? They’re time sinks that smear peanut butter on your good stuff. If you curse at or near them the government takes them away, which isn’t so bad but then you miss them after a while.
• Some people can hear but not so well, filmmaker. Isn’t that weird? But these folks have trouble with overlapping dialogue or weird audio effects on voices or echoes or any of a bunch of other stuff that you thought made your film better. They need help, and subtitles help.

There are many more reasons, filmmaker, so don’t worry that you’re giving into the deaf’s terrorist demands. People who can hear like you can will want to have subtitles too.

Subtitling films is easy, filmmaker. Considering what you had to do to convince that restaurant you could shoot there after hours, or what you had to sell out of your family’s assets to buy a nice camera, this will be a piece of cake. It’s so easy you could subtitle a feature film in a single day. Think of it; a complete new audience and a great feature added to this film you slaved over for weeks, with just an added day of work. It’s so simple, interns could do it. You’ll want to let it sit for a day or two afterwards and proofread it of course, but you know about going that extra mile, filmmaker; that restaurant owner had horrible breath and he kissed you like a drunk sailor. Subtitling is easy.

There’s this program called subtitle workshop, filmmaker. I know you don’t read very well, which explains that stilted dialogue in your love scene, so let’s make those letters nice and big:

GET SUBTITLE WORKSHOP.

It’s free, filmmaker. You love free. Free is what you’ve been mainlining the whole way through your film. When you talked about how great it would be and how hard you were working on your film, you were probably getting a free coffee from your buddy or an understanding person who was worried about the poor filmmaker. A lot of people are worried about you, filmmaker, as I am. So when I say this program is free, I mean it. It’s free and free. A popup will happen because those people are probably starving because filmmakers are taking their program for free, but you know how to kill a popup, I know you do. After all, you killed your gag reflex hanging out with the kind of people who hang out near people who make films but don’t make films themselves. You can do it, filmmaker. I know you can.

Hell, you probably have a Mac, filmmaker, because all filmmakers have Macs instead of me. Maybe you edit on Linux only. That’s just awesome, in a way that watching a house burning down the street is awesome. You can now, in the back of your mind, consider ignoring my advice, but I tell you that they make free subtitling software for your machine too, latte-sipping filmmaker, and you can find it in no time. But I use Subtitle Workshop and it works with almost any format of movie, and can output the subtitles dozens of ways. It works for me, and it’ll work for you.

Subtitle workshop is very easy to use, filmmaker. I learned it in no time, and subtitled 7 hours of film. I subtitled bonus material, introductory material, and all the actual films. I even added subtitle tracks on top of other subtitle tracks! One of my episodes has a bunch of people in it, too many to put their names under. So I made a subtitle track with their names on it, so you could watch the movie and see who was talking. Isn’t that slick, filmmaker? I did that. And you can do it too and claim it was your idea, just like you think it was your idea to have the murderer be the priest. Whoops.

Filmmaker, I haven’t wanted to insult you through this, but it’s hard not to. You somehow got all this way, before finding my weblog entry, thinking that subtitling is unnecessary or hard. It is neither, filmmaker, and now that you know the secret of subtitle workshop you can go ahead and subtitle your film, or do that special thing you do to make some poor sap do it for you.

I love you, filmmaker, like all those people you meet in the film industry love you.

Subtitle your fucking movie.

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While I registered the domain name in 2002, production in earnest of GET LAMP started in October of 2005. It is now February of 2008. Assume for fun that it will take into the summer to finish this, which is starting to look cheery and optimistic. This means it will have taken three years to make this film. The previous film, BBS Documentary, was started in October of 2001 and started showing up in homes in May of 2005. That’s about four years.

I assume the arcade documentary, when that rolls around in earnest, will be at this same rate, 2-4 years. At that point I’ll be in my 40s.

Cleaving things like this, I end up thinking I’ve probably got five movies in me. One’s finished, one is almost done. One is planned and somewhat in production. That leaves probably two I don’t know about yet.

This is me assuming that by the time I’m about 50 I won’t want to be making this films. Considering how unpredictable life is, I could be quite wrong and I’ll drop dead in between interviews when I’m 70. Or maybe this one is the last one I’ll ever finish. I don’t know, after all.

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to ponder, every once in a while, what those two movies would be. I look at the vectors of other documentary guys and how they transitioned over time, and I am concerned I will end up with a dreary political film of some sort, trying to “do something” with my documentary skills to get a “message” out there. Here’s hoping I don’t do that.

Or I could move into fictional filmmaking. Like a guy who’s tasted the thrill of building his own engine who then rents a car, it just doesn’t seem like it’d be as much fun. But others have done it to great success and even seemed to enjoy themselves. I couldn’t see myself wandering the hallways in LA trying to get it made, though; LA is where I visit my buddies who live out there, and I never set foot in any of the “stuff”. In fact, I made it a point to bittorrent under the Hollywood sign.

Oh, speaking of bad investments, actually… that trip to Hollywood was part of something called the DeviantArt Summit, an event held in this beautiful theater that had been around forever. We got in essentially free because of RaD Man’s connections; we thought we’d make major bank on the whole thing, so we invested in this really swank setup for selling my documentary and some ACiD related material. I think I paid $600 for the machine rental and the big BBS Documentary poster, and of course flight and hotel. I sold two copies. Two. But here’s where you have to take in the whole value of things, because I got to meet Michael Robertson of MP3.COM fame (gave him a copy), Bruce Sterling (gave HIM a copy), verified the real story of Sonique, stayed at the amazing Roosevelt Hotel, ate at some fine fine restaurants, drove over and hung out with Tom Jennings to get him his copies of the documentary, and generally had an amazing time. So do we judge the “value” by the sales or what happened? I go by what happened.

I’m at no loss of suggestions of films I should do; many of them are along the line of “Usenet” or “Internet Culture” or “Slashdot”. I could see “Usenet” but even that’d be a little much for me, and it doesn’t make my heart and head burn. That heartburn is where the energy comes to see something to the end. Every day I work on my little text adventure documentary, I am full of pure glee. Months of research and travel and work and I still thrill at it; I don’t know many subjects besides arcades that will have this effect.

I don’t spend too much time considering those mystery films or what my film career will do or where it goes; I’m just happy that after making my dad drop eighty grand into my college education for film, I actually made back that 80 grand doing film. That’s got to count for something.

And the best part: When I’m done with these five movies, people will look at my IMDB entry and go “Wow, he didn’t do much of anything.”

5 Comments

I had a new record rather recently: someone decided to download textfiles.com through 100 simultaneous connections.

I have to be clear that I don’t mean 100 files downloaded or they connected to me 100 times in some period of time; I mean that they maintained 100 separate connections to my server and had them going full bore for hours. They were obviously on some sort of connection not unlike the satellite-death-ray at the end of Akira; the pipe that textfiles.com rests on had been dropped to emulate an acoustic coupler running during a GWAR concert.

How many leeches can dance on the end of a pipe is a question that’s been considered for decades; the guys who take and don’t give, what they are in the scheme of things. Personally, I consider them vital links in the chain, people willing to be distribution points across time and distance, even if their collections don’t make it out into the general pool for some time. When I collect piles of disk images from 1980s era 8-bit home computers, I know full well these are the products of man-years of gimmie-gimmie downloads, someone hooked to a BBS overnight and cleaning them out.

In this case, however, the folks involved are trying to acquire the data through insane means and literally ruining it for everybody. I now use the textfiles.com server for other projects, not because I don’t have servers locally that could do the work, but so I can feel the heartbeat of the connection over the day.

Good thing I have a Defibrillator handy.

This Defibrillation device comes in the form of a script, which I call OINK. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
#
# OINK OINK
for oink in `netstat -an | grep ESTAB | cut -f5-8 -d"." | grep ^80 | cut -c11- | sort -u`
do
ponk=`netstat -an | grep ESTAB | grep $oink | wc -l`
if [ "$pork" -gt "5" ]
then
echo "$pork     $oink"
fi
done

Oink will tell me of anyone who has more than 5 connections. It doesn’t DO anything; I have to do whatever I feel necessary, which shifts over time. Currently I just do a software firewall and block people completely. I could put something into the webserver software, but that’s making apache do all sorts of work it doesn’t need to; better to just forget Mr. Multiconnect ever existed for a while.

What makes this effort worth it are the letters. Oh yes, the delicious, luxurious letters I get from people who slowly, methodically determine that textfiles.com is in fact up, but they are in fact down. Oh, the positions, the promises, the junkie trying to plead his case while you notice all the furniture is missing. It’s a great thing.

And it takes very little bandwidth!

3 Comments

In my pile of incoming documentaries and DVDs to watch, I seem to have stumbled onto a new level of scant packaging. I ordered a copy of “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox”, a documentary about Dr. Bronner. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s fine; that’s the whole point of a documentary, to be about something you don’t already know cold and bring you into that world, if possible. Short form, Dr. Bronner was a holocaust survivor who made a soap and beauty products company and put crazy-go-nuts messages on the label. I especially like the completeness of Cecil’s overview of the subject.

This is the sum total of what showed up in my mailbox:

Sara Lamm seems a nice enough kid from her various interviews she’s given in support of this film. And as far as cross-product promotion goes, you have to hand it to her for having a situation where you can actually buy the documentary with some soap from the soap company.

But wow! A piece of cardboard and a disc!

Kudos for making the DVD Region 0 (this means it can be played on any DVD player, anywhere in the world). At this point, the retardation of Region Encoding should be self-evident, but I’m going to say, good job there. Point to the production.

The menu system is enjoyable, the reference to “All One!” on the packaging was cute, and then there’s this ugly over-restrictive copyright line on the packaging declaring you can’t copy it or lend it to anybody, or play it in public. Wow! That sure brings me back to the good old days when people were worried there’d be illegal speakeasy movie theaters, or that someone would cut you out of your cash because they let someone down the hall at the dorm check out your movie. (Yes, I realize “unauthorized lending” likely refers to a library; but that makes it better how?)

I’m positive they threw that bit of yuck on the packaging because it’s always been done that way and it’s a pleasant expected out of date decoration, like the little cornices on the tops of buildings. It’s cute, it’s familiar, it takes you back.

But then, the more I sat there cranked at how weak the packaging is, I started to think about it.

Why am I so fucked up about this?

I mean, it’s only packaging, right? It’s about the movie, the quality of the production, the stuff on the DVD that you get, and that it all got to me at my house safely. Surely, if the packaging is efficient and made of delightful cardboard that’s probably recycled (although the text doesn’t crow about this, which makes me suspicious), then everything’s howdy-dory, right? Why don’t I shut up and enjoy my fuckin’ movie?

In my case, I don’t feel like I was particularly rewarded for buying this. I got punched on when my movie sold for $50, and this one sells for $25. There’s nothing to recommend buying it to get the package. You might as well rent it. And if you rent it, by the way, I think you’re violating the cute little text cornice on the back. But really, if you were renting it you’d just get the little DVD and you’d have gotten well over 60% of the total weight and experience of the original package!

I feel like there’s some serious not-getting-it going on here.

Similarly, I get that ooky feeling reading about the release of AJ Schnack’s new documentary out on DVD. He and I run in very different circles (although we were in the same room once!) and so I can hardly speak for him and act like we’re close buddies or anything. But there’s this sense of distance from his own DVD that bothers me, like it happened “over there” and now it’s finished and there we go. I’m trying to imagine having that level of separation from my projects and I can’t do it. And I’d be on my weblog (AJ started his as support for his newest documentary) yammering off about the technical specs, the process of fitting stuff and what worked and didn’t work. Just serving as a warning to others on what not to do or what to avoid seems pretty cool. I bought a copy of his newest DVD, but I’m having the feeling I’m going to get another little package in the mail, one that doesn’t compliment the work within.

I think of the theatrical run as a little party, and the DVD packaging as a promise. It’s the final work, the total control of the created “product” that you are sending along to people. I’m starting to wonder if I’m totally off book with everybody else. Isn’t that where your work will have the most effect, in someone’s home, their special place where they watch these things? Or is it that critical that you know it’s in a huge commodified popcorn-stank sticky box on the outskirts of town, for a week or two?

3 Comments